According to The Consumerist, Facebook’s new terms of service assign the company perpetual ownership of all your posted content, even after you close your account. Yes, this means that years hence, when you run for President, win an Olympic Gold Medal, or marry one of Brad Pitt’s kids, Facebook has the right to sell your high school musings and sextings to the Tattler or Perez Hilton, or whomever. Less glamorously, these records might be sold to your employer, or to your opponent in a lawsuit.
And I think that’s a fine thing. No, wait. Here’s my reasoning: Our “right to privacy” is based on a culture of concealment. As a society in flux, with conservative roots and a progressive trajectory, we have clung to a crufty set of normative mores that are impossible to uphold, and we gloss over our low success rate with this “privacy” thing. We talk about privacy as a right and an ideal, but isn’t it really just a tool for jury-rigging our identities? We use privacy as a work-around to escape those parts of our being that don’t validate when tested.
The “right to privacy” allows and encourages us to remain visibly perfect, to use a pretty skin to mask our imperfections. Because our failings are hidden, and because we are alone with them, they fester into the angst, anomie and depression that are the hallmarks of the great art of the 20th century.
If we imagine a state of complete disclosure, a Heinlein-like universe in which we all know everything about each other, there could be no shame, nor could there be any reason for our personal data to be “used against us.” I think the reason our teenagers don’t care about privacy is that they live in a culture that doesn’t think the same way about shame and concealment. Those ideas have no potency for them.
And they are right. Would I give up my personal privacy for the “right” to live free of judgment and shame? In a heartbeat.
(hat tip Jeremy Zilar)